Monday, December 31, 2007

Thoughts on the New Year

"New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights."

~Hamilton Wright Mabie

"New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual."

~Mark Twain

"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective."

We celebrate quietly but with great enthusiasm. We have a bit of a feast and spend time together chatting about the last year and what we hope will come in the next.

Of course, we watch Dick Clark when the ball drops! And we enjoy the people on our street shouting Happy New Year starting around 10:50 PM. It's contagious to be a part of the excitement and good spirits are contagious!

Book One in the Undercover Dish series

Tributes to Great Writers

International Author Interviews

Mark Twain on Writing

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."